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Android and the geek in me

I haven’t written about my Android in awhile, but I’ve been messing with it a bit more lately. The following has been rattling around in my head for the past few weeks. Please excuse the partial lack of structure.

I’ve since purchased the Seidio extended battery, I can get between 30-48 hours of battery life, depending on usage. While I haven’t been keeping track like before, I’ll just say that I’m around 60-65% after being unplugged from 07:00 to 13:00 (six hours). Using the with the stock battery, it went down to 20-25%.[1. The six hours comes from being at school, using Audiogalaxy, Google Voice, and TweetDeck heavily between classes.]

More recently, Marcus demonstrated some features of CyanogenMod over a Monday lunch at school. A couple days later, my phone is running CM6.1, but I’ll probably upgrade to CM7 RC1 for kicks. (Interested? Backup first.)

I prefer the default Android calendar app over the calendar app used from HTC Sense. The weekly view displays event descriptions.

I also like the default Gallery app for viewing photos.

I don’t see “Verizon Wireless” on the notification or lock screens anymore.

I experienced a slew of FC errors while installing my first few apps. Using ROM Manager, under Utilities, run Fix Permissions. You can also reboot to ClockworkMod Recovery and fix permissions before you boot into the OS.

With a rooted phone, PicMe and ShootMe are two awesome screen grabber (screenshot) apps.

I didn’t realize that the Mount USB Storage option in ClockworkMod Recovery allowed my to plug my phone to my computer with the USB cable, then copy files off my SD card. I copied my ROM backups to my computer for safekeeping. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have a way to revert back to the stock ROM since my 8 GB MicroSD card died, and I didn’t know about this feature. (I hope I won’t need to do that, though.)

Oh, and use Titanium Backup to uninstall apps you don’t want. (Why? I believe Twitter and Facebook were only included because of the Google Apps install. Oh, I nuked YouTube as well in favor of HTML5 videos.) No need for Terminal, unless that’s how you roll.

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Bryan Villarin

Bryan is a Community Guardian at Automattic. He's also a photographer, card magician, and cat whisperer.
(Thanks to my friend and colleague Steve Blythe for the sweet photo!)
View all posts by Bryan Villarin